


Untitled Sherlock Secret Santa Fic

by witchwood_hull



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, Genderswap, Rule 63, abuse of postal rules/rates, hidden messages, mild description of off-screen violence, nonsensical messages, relatively non-explicit description of medical procedures/icky substances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 17:58:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchwood_hull/pseuds/witchwood_hull
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo Watson has suspicions, then gets postcards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untitled Sherlock Secret Santa Fic

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this set of incredible genderswapped Sherlock characters](http://notcuddles.tumblr.com/post/36832625289/lifecrystals-wowzamorphous-artcrystals), a declaration that BBC Sherlock needs more breasts, and the idea that Sherlock's last conversation was actually a coded message. 
> 
> Written for justonemoremiraclesherlock as part of the Sherlock Secret Santa exchange.

Jo couldn't sleep. This was nothing new; she hadn't slept a full night in months. She got up, drank a glass of water, opened her laptop and turned it on. A few minutes later, she was staring at a half-finished blog entry about Sherlock, her fingers still on the keyboard. 

Not entirely still—Jo's left hand trembled faintly, had done since that day. _That Day_. It was always capitalized in her head, a long, horrible day that had left her feeling...like this. Empty. Dry. Cracked open and her vitality run out into sand, like a skull struck by a bullet under the Afghan sun—

There was now a line and a half consisting of the letter _d_ in her draft. Jo selected the line and deleted it, then reread what she'd already written. 

> **_Last Words_ **
> 
> _Sherlock told me that she'd researched me before she met me, that everything she'd told me about myself when we spoke at Bart's for the first time she'd merely memorized. Then she told me that it, and I assume she meant her ability, is a trick, that it's just a magic trick._
> 
> _I don't know_

There was something wrong with the entry, something beyond the fact that it seemed to reinforce the assertion that Sherlock had been a fraud. What was it? Jo put her computer aside and got up to find...something; she was staring into the depressingly normal depths of the fridge when it hit her. 

_It was the wrong tense._ Sherlock had spoken in the past-tense until she'd gotten to the bit about _a trick_ , whereupon she switched to _present_ tense. Did it mean something? Did it mean anything, or was she so desperate that she was clutching at any scrap of evidence that fit her pet theory? Sherlock had shouted at Dimmock for that very thing, after all.

If there was one thing that she knew about Sherlock, it was that she spoke precisely as she meant to. Jo knew she wanted Sherlock to be alive, wanted it with the same kind of marrow-deep longing she'd wanted to return to the green and pleasant land of her childhood in the first few minutes after being shot. She knew that she would take any chance, no matter how tiny, to hope that Sherlock's death—suicide—was the lie. 

Sherlock said exactly what she meant to say, even when what she said was manipulative and designed to get her what she wanted. Sherlock was fond of puzzles, of ciphers and hiding things within other things, of things that were _clever_. Sherlock didn't deal well with frustration—she snapped and snarled and said horrible things about the intelligence displayed by others. There was a clear line between _that_ and her deliberate use of words at other times, however.

Jo returned to her chair and her entry, staring at it for another few minutes. There was only one way to get the answer to whether she was imagining things: wait until after sunrise. 

\- - * - -

Myra looked up from the memo she was writing as the door to her office crashed open, then closed again, cutting off her secretary's irritated demand that her visitor _make an appointment!_ "Hello, Jocasta."

"Is she alive?" Jo planted her hands on Myra's desk and leaned over, her best _I am your Captain and you'll answer my questions NOW you lowly grunt!_ glare in place. 

"I'm sorry, is who alive? There are so—"

"Shut your noise," Jo snapped, leaning over a little more. "You know damn well who I'm asking about. Answer me, _is she alive?_ "

"Doctor Watson—"

"Answer me!" She shouted the words, so far over the desk now that she caught the other woman's suppressed flinch.

"Why on Earth would you start wondering that now?" Myra kept her voice as calm and steady as ever, her hands folded together over the bottom of the piece of paper before her. 

"Because—" Jo took a deep breath and straightened up some. "Sherlock said something to me. Just before... Before. It didn't _fit_. So I thought maybe it was...a clue." God, she felt ridiculous, offering up her flimsy little theory to _Myra_. As if Jo Watson was any kind of detective at all. 

"Tell me." 

"What?" 

"Tell me what she said that didn't fit," Myra said, sitting back in her chair and letting her eyes close halfway. 

"Oh, uh... She said, she said that she researched me before we met, and that it's a trick, a magic trick." 

"That's not so strange." 

Jo glared again, leaning over once more, a twisted kind of glee bubbling up as she spat Sherlock's paraphrased words at Myra. "You hear but you do not _listen_ ," she said. "It was all past-tense except for the bit about the magic trick." 

Myra's brows rose and she sat up straight, her mouth a hard line. "I see." 

"Sherlock is—was—will always be a fucking show-off," Jo said, focusing on holding on to her fierce expression so she wouldn't start thinking about how to refer to Sherlock. "Do you know how many past-due bills wouldn't have been if she bothered to stop opening the envelopes and piling all of the invoices together? Hiding things in plain sight—"

"You think it was a message." 

"I think it's possible," Jo said, standing up again because her back (and her leg, what the hell?) were starting to complain about her position. "And if I learned anything from Baskerville..." 

"What would you do, if she was alive?" Myra's turn to lean forward, resting her elbows on the desk, her fingers laced together, the knuckles of her thumbs pressed to the skin just under her lower lip. "Would you go rabbiting off to join her?" 

"I don't know." She honestly didn't; she hadn't allowed herself to think that far ahead. No point in getting her hopes _that_ high. "There is one thing I want to do, though." 

"And what is that?" 

"Punch you in the face." Jo held up her right hand in a closed fist, then let it fall again. "All I want to know is whether she's alive, and if she is, why she's not...where she's supposed to be." 

"I'm afraid I won't be able to allow you the luxury," Myra said, without any smugness whatsoever. "You can say it, you know. It's not exactly a secret to me." 

"It's none of your business, not that you'll ever believe that. Just tell me what I want to know, Myra, before I decide that Pentonville really isn't such a deterrent after all." 

"She's my sister. It's always going to be my business." Myra sighed and sat back in her chair, just looking at Jo. "You do know that you're only the second person she's ever taken to in such a way? The first was a boy in her sixth-form music class. He played the cello and wore hand-me-down clothing." 

"But you won't let anyone return the favor," Jo said, dropping into one of the guest chairs and rubbing her face. "During the Ian Monkford case, Sherlock got Mrs Monkford to give her information by saying things that she—Mrs Monkford—immediately contradicted. She's never _once_ told anyone we're not a couple. They assume, I protest, Sherlock's silent. But you knew that, didn't you." 

"Yes." 

"The woman who always has to be right, always has to have the last word. _Silent_." 

So was Myra. The silence lingered, the two of them lost in thought. 

"I hold you responsible for all of this," Jo said, at last. 

"You hold yourself responsible as well." 

"Because I didn't _observe_. I should have known—If Mr Hudson had been in _any_ kind of immediate, actual, danger, Sherlock would've beaten me to the taxi. That she wanted to sit and _think_..." She shook her head. 

"And I suppose telling you that she made her own choices—"

"No. It doesn't make any difference at all." Jo's fake smile was all bitterness and grief. "Just tell me. Tell me, so I can...figure out what to do next." 

 Myra opened the right-hand drawer of her desk and removed a card, which she placed on the slick wood. She took up her pen, wrote two lines, then pushed the card across the desktop. "Here is your answer. And I am invoking doctor-patient privilege, Doctor." 

Jo grunted, picking up the bit of card stock. 

> _Yes._  
>  _Burn this._

There was an ashtray—heavy, crystal, with a smudge of ash in the bottom of it—on the corner of the desk nearest her. Jo picked up the heavy gold lighter that stood beside it, struck a flame, and set the card alight. Once it was consumed, she stood up and headed for the door. 

"You're welcome," Myra said, and pretended not to see the two-fingered salute that Jo threw up as she walked out. 

 - - * - - 

Seventeen days after Jo had been to see Myra, she received a postcard. It was remarkable only in that it was addressed to her; she knew no one that was abroad—Or did she? Her heart thumped as she turned it over (photo of a city with the name _Barcelona_ along the bottom edge). 

The handwriting was unfamiliar, loopy, a little crooked as if the card had been held against a slanting surface. 

> _only fools take folish risks and be carful_

That was all it said. The stamp wasn't Spanish, a little banner over what might have been a castle reading _Magyar Posta_. Jo smiled anyway, even as anger bubbled underneath it. There was only one person that would have sent her something remotely similar... And under the circumstances, she was decidedly grateful that it wasn't a dead rat or the like. A finger. A sock. Well, the sock might be tolerable, provided it was clean and not, say, infested with fleas or carrying ringworm or something. 

Shaking her head at herself, Jo carried the mail upstairs. 

\- - * - -

Fifteen days went by before another postcard arrived at 221B. This one featured a picture of the Hassan II mosque at sunset, and the stamp this time was French. The handwriting was still unfamiliar, the lines squarer to the edges of the card itself. 

> _I visited this mosque._  
>  _Mosques are quite beautiful._  
>  _It was quiet and cool in-_  
>  _side._  
>  _Someday, you should visit._  
>  _You would appreciate it,_  
>  _obviously._  
>  _Until then,_  
>  _take care._

The message was finished off with an indecipherable signature, quite unlike the indecipherable signature her flatmate used. It hardly mattered, since Jo knew exactly who had posted it... But she wasn't sure about the message. She had never expressed any interest in mosques, not that she could recall; they'd never come up in conversation. 

Later that evening, she considered the two cards that she'd put on top of her computer. An idea, a tiny filament, waved at her and she pursed her lips. Sherlock and Myra had their reasons for not telling her, and if— _when_ —Sherlock came home, they were going to have words about that. For now, she was fairly sure she could come up with something that looked innocuous enough but would give Sherlock proof that her messages had come through. 

> **_Anger and landmarks_ **
> 
> _There's a building in Budapest called the Fishermen's Bastion. Fish, however, were apparently not used as part of the defenses. (I think I would have given up if someone had started pelting me with eels or trout or something while I was trying to storm their castle.)_
> 
> _The Hassan II mosque is quite lovely, too. I've never been there, only seen pictures of it._
> 
> _I'm still so angry about...everything. I have so many questions that I can't ever get a decent answer to, not now. Never to know why. I'll have to give it up, someday, but right now it's what I have._

\- - * - -

Only ten days had gone by when the next card arrived. The picture was a black and white shot of two good-looking men in early twentieth-century suits, one with his arm around the other. After a few moments of staring at it, Jo realized that it was probably a vintage photo, turning it over to look—The stamp was from Trinidad and Tobago, which made her wonder how many different countries Sherlock had stamps from, and the message showed the characteristic smudges of a left-handed writer and slow-drying ink. It was still legible enough. 

> _Saw this in a shop and thought of you._  
>  _Original suit-porn!_  
>  _Right up your street. Don't know if they're your type, not_  
>  _really._  
>  _You'll appreciate it anyway._
> 
> _You have more than you know._

It didn't take much thinking to come up with a response to that. 

> **_Tastes change over time._ **
> 
> _I used to love a particular brand of onion-flavored crisps. I ate almost nothing but, for a whole year. When I ate crisps, I mean, I didn't survive on crisps alone._
> 
> _Then...something changed. I'm still not sure what it was, if I grew up or the formula changed or what, but those aren't my favorites any more._
> 
> _Had a bit of a revelation today: I lost something important, but I don't think anyone else knew just how important it was. I'll find it again, and when I do, I'll make sure the whole bloody world knows it. I'll take out adverts on the tube if I have to._

 - - * - -

Twenty-five days passed, and on the twenty-sixth, a postcard with a picture of a lobster on it arrived. The stamp was American, the handwriting so small Jo nearly needed a magnifying glass to read it. 

> _I think you would like it here._  
>  _Wide spaces, calm, lots of cows._  
>  _If cows appeal to you, anyway._  
>  _Should they not, there are also sheep._  
>  _Hundreds of sheep._  
>  _I don't count them; too busy._  
>  _Would you? Probably. You'd think it amusing._  
>  _Everyone here is dull, but there's a pub_  
>  _round the corner that's not so dull. Needs more rugby lads tho._  
>  _Evenings here are disgustingly pastoral._  
>  _Hope all is well. If you want a treat, have a slice of_  
>  _opera cake. On me._  
>  _Mr Crofts makes the best ones,_  
>  _even if he uses too much vanilla._

Jo read it three times, then put it on the stack with the rest. There was something...off, about the messages that came to her, something that made her feel like she wasn't seeing the whole picture. This wasn't really a new sensation, given that her correspondence involved Sherlock Holmes, but it wasn't one she'd missed. Or had she? 

What did wide spaces, livestock, cake, vanilla, and a pub (with or without rugby lads) have to do with one another? The same thing her interest in visiting a mosque had to do with anything, she supposed.  

\- - * - -

> **_Livestock and an explanation_ **
> 
> _I've gotten some comments, some email, about the fact that I've been writing really strange posts recently. This blog started out as something else entirely, before I met Sherlock Holmes. It was supposed to be about me, my life, my thoughts. It was supposed to help me "adjust to civilian life". As you can see, I have a total of 5 entries about "civilian life", and none of them were terribly helpful in getting me to adjust._
> 
> _Then I met Sherlock, and I had to adjust all right – to a life spent chasing criminals and joking with Detective Inspectors and being insulted for my taste in everything from television to cardies (I just typed that as 'corpses' and I don't know if I should worry about it or not)._
> 
> _To answer the concerned queries: yes, I am perfectly all right. As all right as I can be, anyway. I've not gone round the bend, potty, or otherwise lost my mind. And even if I had, I don't think that it would manifest in blog entries about the Fishermen's Bastion in Budapest or having lost something._
> 
> _As for the livestock: I've never spent much time thinking about whether I prefer cows to sheep. Cows give us milk, cream, butter, cheese, and beef. Sheep give milk, cheese, (has anyone ever made butter from sheep's milk?), lamb, mutton, and best of all wool for yarn. It's really six of one and a half-dozen of the other._

\- - * - -

The next postcard came in a week's time, bearing a shot of Lord Nelson from Trafalgar. The stamp was English, too, which led Jo to wonder if that meant Sherlock was home. After reading the message—and taking in the fact that it looked like someone had smeared blood on it—she decided that Sherlock wasn't. 

> _cannot abide fools & the uninteresting_
> 
> _think god really looks after fools & children?_
> 
> _don't own it/be careful_

An oddly-nervous Milton Hooper brought her the results a week after she'd asked him to check the blood. "It's not... I mean, I didn't get a match. To anyone. Human. Because it's not human."

"Not human?" Apparently she'd been more tense than she'd realized, taking a deep breath for what felt like the first time in months. "What is it, then, do you know?" 

"No, sorry. Um. Maybe a cat or a dog? Or a mouse. Maybe a cat caught a mouse and—" One corner of his mouth jerked up as he made a gesture like a cat batting at something. 

"Ah. Always a possibility, I suppose," Jo said. She didn't believe it for a minute, but then, stranger things had happened. And in her own flat, too. "Right. Thanks. Thanks for that. It was nice of you." 

"It was nothing," Milton said, actually smiling this time. It didn't last long, but it was real. "It was nice to see you again." 

"Yeah." They made their awkward goodbyes and Jo escaped. 

\- - * - -

> **_Reassurances_ **
> 
> _Sometimes it's nice to know that something that looks horrible really isn't. Sutures, for instance. They look terrible, at a glance, but a closer look shows that the wound is clean, the sutures well-placed, and that things are healing up just as they should._
> 
> _I'm less angry these days. If I think about things too much, I can work myself into a righteous fury, but it happens less._
> 
> _Sometimes I wonder if it means I'm forgetting, or getting numb, or getting better. And sometimes I see or hear or think of something and I reach for my mobile before I remember._
> 
> _The sutures aren't coming out for a long time. Not until what's underneath has stabilized._

\- - * - -

Jo's visits to Ella grew sporadic, after she started getting the postcards. Eventually she'd just politely told the therapist that they both knew she wasn't improving and that she was going to stop seeing her. Ella hadn't approved, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. 

It was a month before the next card arrived, this one a picture of a Majorcan beach with bright umbrellas and a Canadian stamp. The writing was curly and the words were squished up against one another, covering as much of the allotted space as possible. 

> _Sun is hot._  
>  _Tide-tables are interesting,_  
>  _and calculating tides is a decent way to pass time._  
>  _You'd disagree, though._  
>  _Surf-fishing is boring, too much waiting._  
>  _Tide lines are full of rubbish:_  
>  _rotting bits of vegetation_  
>  _orange peels and driftwood_  
>  _naff chunks of plastic_  
>  _grotty old fish carcasses (the only interesting things)_  
>  _Find plenty of shells too_  
>  _oysters, even, but no pearls._  
>  _Remembered to wear a hat today._  
>  _Made the sun bearable,_  
>  _even without ice cream._  
>  _Pleased overall._

The signature was as illegible as ever, but this time it seemed to have a bit that underlined most of the word _pleased_. Probably the crossbar of a T, most likely. The message, though, that was... Jo had once, in a moment of idle insanity, tried to imagine taking Sherlock to the beach. Even in the privacy of her own head it hadn't ended well, and as a result she'd never thought of it again. 

Now, though... She could almost see Sherlock, well-covered with sunscreen and wearing a floppy hat, poking sulkily at the high-tide line until she came across the body of a fish, which she promptly investigated and pronounced a cause of death for. (Asphyxia? Blunt force trauma? Old age? Why _did_ fish die without being caught by someone?)

Oh, well, that was _one_ thing that was off: the vocabulary. Naff? Grotty? Not words she'd ever heard from Sherlock's mouth. She wanted to hear them, suddenly, _now_ , wanted to hear Sherlock pronouncing them in whatever way struck her fancy—as if she never wanted to say them again, as if they were the kind of thing said during a seduction, as if they were no more remarkable than, say, 'foot' or 'paperclip'. 

\- - * - -

Jo missed hearing Sherlock's violin, in all of its moods. In all of Sherlock's moods, as well. It wouldn't be anything like the same, but she decided she'd look for something to help fill the silence in the flat. 

> **_It's too quiet._ **
> 
> _So tell me what kind of music I should be listening to these days. Bonus points for classical that_ isn't _opera._

Two days later, Jo got an email with the subject line of _Myotis_. The body of the email contained nothing more than a link to Amazon, and despite knowing she shouldn't, Jo clicked on it anyway. She looked over the sender's information while she waited for the page to load. All it said was ABC in the name line, and the return address was buzzybtec991 at clevermailer.co.uk. Putting the last half of the email address into a search engine got her what turned out to be a remailing service, the page of which informed her that until she got there via Tor and at least three proxies, she couldn't do anything. 

The Amazon page had loaded, so she closed the remailer's site and looked over what she'd been sent to see. It was the score to a movie: _Batman Begins_. One of the tracks was named _Myotis_ , which was oddly familiar beyond having been the subject of the message. The rest of the names had the same kind of half-familiar ring to them, particularly _Corynorhinus_ and _Macrotus_.

Once more, a search engine came to her aid: the tracks were all named for genuses of bats. The idea appealed to her, and she liked the samples well enough that she purchased the album. 

A few days later, one of the doctors on her clinic's mailing list forwarded an email to the group. Jo, deleting messages one by one, idly watched an attached picture load... She was half-looking at the image as she moved her cursor toward the delete button when a word suddenly registered: _Myotis_. 

The picture was of the track listing for the score she'd gotten in the day's post, the score that was playing as she worked. And someone had taken the trouble to put a little red rectangle around the first letters of six tracks, pointing out that the initial letter of each genus when read from top to bottom spelled out _BATMAN_. 

_People say there’s no such thing as coincidence,_ Sherlock said, in the back of her head, _What dull lives they must lead._

So what was it, a bleeding great coincidence that meant absolutely nothing whatsoever, or an actual clue? If it was an actual clue, then someone else knew—No, no, only a few people knew. And it wouldn't be any of the likely-to-be-insulted-for-their-lack-of-brains people on the mailing list. So... Jo tried to remember how to see the message all by itself. Right-click? Ah, yes, there.

Viewing the message in its own window gave her a better idea of how many people it had come from. There were dozens of email addresses, most in lists tagged with _[Fwd:]_ before them. She skimmed the addresses, occasionally reading them when something odd caught her eye: _birdseatbugs, tennisfreak95, denvermtnlover, west.plus.corwin.5evar, buzzybtec991, dilestrhmc—_ Wait. Buzzy—It was the same address as the link to the soundtrack. 

Jo frowned at her screen, despite the quick flash of joy in finding two things that went together. Sherlock probably didn't have the problem that _she_ currently faced, which was _to what the bloody hell is this a clue?_ Sherlock would have cracked it by now and complained that it had been no more challenging than a deed box to Sayers's Blindfold Bill. 

So she had a link to a soundtrack, which she had followed; the soundtrack itself, which she was enjoying (when she wasn't tuning it out to think about other things); and a picture of the track listing with what looked like an encoded message. Cleverish, certainly, but other than all being related to bats and the Batman franchise (which she had never been particularly interested in, and Sherlock had likely actively avoided), there was nothing else that was—Unless. 

Unless it was a way to get her to reply to buzzybtec991, and it was another way of communicating. One that was more personal, more intimate, but not any more secure. What could it hurt to try? She'd just send a thank-you for the suggestion, because it would be A) polite and B) not unexpected. She'd do a general thank-you post on her blog, too, but individuals liked to be responded to as individuals, right?

The reply went through. When Jo tried sending another email, a week later – she asked if there were any other albums the sender would recommend, since their last suggestion worked out so nicely – it bounced back as undeliverable. She was not as bothered by it as she might have been six months earlier. 

After a couple of weeks, another postcard arrived: A picture of Sun Voyager (Icelandic: _Sólfar_ ), a sculpture by Jón Gunnar Árnason (1931 - 1989), according to the tiny print on the reverse, with a Finnish stamp. Another left-handed person had written it, judging by the smears and the ghosts of phrases that showed up in a few places. 

> _I would like to report that Reykjavik is a decent sort of place._  
>  _Too bad about the curry situation, though._  
>  _Haven't had a decent curry in forever._  
>  _Usually go for Chinese these days, much easier to find quality._  
>  _Research can only do so much for finding food._  
>  _Took a day trip to a sheep farm._  
>  _Sheep's milk can be made into butter. Not common, though. _  
> _Wandered around a pasture and got dribbled on by lambs._  
>  _I disliked the owner's daughter, she laughed at me._  
>  _The lambs also chewed my coat, which isn't funny._  
>  _Held out hope that the lambs would dribble on her;_  
>  _of course they didn't._  
>  _Utterly daft, sheep and sheep farmers alike._  
>  _Took a nap after, which was pleasant._  
>  _Yanks woke me up, though, the tossers._  
>  _Outrage meant nothing to them—they're all barbarians._  
>  _Until next time._

The missive was capped off with a smear instead of a signature, but as it was the same color as the ink used for the message, Jo decided it was the result of a fast writer with fresh ink rather than anything sinister. She read the words over again, then added the card to her stash on the mantelpiece, between the skull and the wall. 

\- - * - -

> **_More about livestock_ **
> 
> _I've been thinking about a change of pace. Maybe I should take up sheep farming. I've been told that only the barmy farm sheep, and I did learn that you can make butter with sheep's milk. I suppose I should really know more than that if I want to take it up..._
> 
> _I don't know. Life has been rather strange for me, recently. I'm not actually planning on changing careers any time soon, just...thinking out loud. I think._
> 
> _I did consider purchasing a dwarf cow for about ten minutes. Then I remembered that Mr Hudson wouldn't appreciate a cow of any size in his back garden._

Another fortnight passed, another postcard arrived, this one a shot of ridge upon ridge of mountains that faded out into a smoky blue background: the Blue Ridge mountains, according to the information on the backside. The stamp this time was Italian, showing a picture of what was probably Mt Etna. 

The message was shorter than last time, and nearly as random. 

> _Will someone please tell me why the_  
>  _average train breakfast must be so disappointing?_  
>  _It's shameful that a country known for its cooking_  
>  _takes so little pride in translating it into decent traveler's_  
>  _fare. Simply unbearable._  
>  _Of course, I suppose I could have brought my own._  
>  _Rather a bother to do that, though. Occasionally, a_  
>  _man must simply grit his teeth and bear his burden._  
>  _Ever faithfully,_

The signature was a mess as usual. Jo wondered how Sherlock dealt with the travel—crossword puzzles only distracted her for so long, and she was all alone... Or was she? The thought of Sherlock having found someone else, someone to stand by her as Jo had done, sat oddly with her. Could it be possible that there was more than one person in the world mad enough to put up with all of Sherlock's...Sherlock-ness? (And no, she didn't care if it wasn't a real word; Sherlock wasn't around to object, so no harm there.)

Thinking about Sherlock on her own led her to wondering if the woman would understand if, next time they were introduced, Jo appended 'her plus-one' to it. She made an amused sound at the idea—not at linking them so blatantly, since Sherlock had never objected in the past—but undoubtedly The Doctor, his companion of the season, and any dialogue were filed under both 'crap telly' and 'useless rubbish' in Sherlock's brain. 

Ah well. Jo tucked the card away behind the skull and went on with her day. 

\- - * - -

"There you are, dear," Mr Hudson said, handing Jo a cup and saucer. 

"Ta," Jo said, falling quiet as they sorted their tea.

After they'd both had their first sips, Mr Hudson looked across the table at her and said, "You seem a little more yourself, these days." 

"I feel like it," Jo said, looking down into her cup. She looked up again, a bit of a smile pulling at her mouth. "Those postcards I get, they... They help." 

"I daresay that would be like her, to send someone postcards with nonsense instead of what's _really_ important." He sighed and broke the biscuit he'd chosen in half. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—"

"No, it's all right. I'm all right." Jo reached over and put her hand on his. "And you're right. It is, it is so very much something Sherlock would do." 

"Jo..."

She'd never wondered about their landlord, not really, until the whole Adler...mess. That Mr Hudson saw Sherlock as something of a daughter (and then by extension Jo herself), that made sense: he was old enough that Jo and Sherlock could have been his children, his wife had been sentenced to death in Florida, he was alone. Paternal feelings toward his tenants weren't surprising. 

That he didn't find Sherlock's morbid taste in fun alarming, _that_ was odd. And then there was what Jo thought of as The Second American Incident, where Mr Hudson had gone from wittering victim to laughing co-conspirator in the space of Sherlock's theft of a mazarin tart from his fridge. 

So now, as Mr Hudson gave her a look that was all sharp edges and calculation—not nearly as obsidian-edged as the looks that Sherlock could bring out, but effective none the less—Jo wondered just who Mr Hudson really was. Instead of asking, however, she merely said, "Yes?" 

"You tell her, when she gets home. Even if you have to sit on her to get her attention first." He smiled, turned his hand over and squeezed. 

"I—How—"

"Everyone can see how you two look at one another—well, not the two of you, that's usually how these things work—"

Jo held up her hand and shook her head. "No, not that, that's... Yeah, I know, that's what everyone tells me. No, I meant...the other part."

"Oh," Mr Hudson sat back and picked up his cup, waving his free hand. "Sherlock isn't the kind of woman to kill herself, and certainly not like that. Get herself killed, yes—she _does_ insist on dashing about and the way she refuses to eat when she's working or when she's bored..." He sipped his tea. "And the way she vexes people, it's a wonder she hasn't had more people trying to kill her before now. But kill _herself_ , while claiming she's a liar? Pfft."

"Wish the rest of the world thought of it like that," Jo said, the sadness and anger bubbling up for a moment or two. "I've gotten really good at not reading anything when I'm out." 

"So have I." 

\- - * - -

The next card that Jo received came six weeks after the last, creased and mottled from what seemed to have been a dip in a puddle. The picture was of the Erie Canal, the stamp from Luxembourg, and the message was just legible, if not comprehensible—but once she'd deciphered the full text, it made no less sense than any of the others. The letters were so small she had to resort to finding a magnifying glass after all.

> _I have been dreaming of greenery. All shades of green, from bread mold to emerald and every color before, between, after. If I could, I would gather armfuls of the plants in my dreams and send them to you._
> 
> _For you, I would gather oak branches thick with leaves, cedar boughs, geraniums in general, artemesia and traveler's joy; I would bind them all around with nasturtiums. I would gather roses and weave them into a crown for you, scraping the thorns away with my thumbnails if I had to._
> 
> _For myself, I would give you as many purple hyacinth as I could carry, thornapple, white roses with question marks on every last petal, rhododendron, ranunculus, pine, motherwort, pansy, mezereon, nigella damascena, stock, amaranthus, jonquils and daffodils, all bunched about a spike of gladioli and surmounted with a pair of dahlias in the richest arterial and venous reds._
> 
> _With lemon and peach blossoms –_

Jo wrote her response in a bit of a daze, occasionally staring off into the distance for minutes at a time, or losing herself in galleries of floral photography. 

> **_You can learn a lot from talking to the flowers..._ **
> 
> _I'm not even going to pretend that this post will make sense to everyone. It's not a sign of mental decline, I swear it, even though it might seem like it. I'll just put it behind a line so that you can skip it if you want to._
> 
> _\-- Read More --_
> 
> _Talking_ to _them, not_ about _them._
> 
> _You can learn a lot from reading about flowers, too. More than the usual mundane things, like the Latin name and where they grow and whether they're poisonous. It's fitting, isn't it, that so many of them are._
> 
> _And some of the names, those are interesting too. Love-lies-bleeding. Love in a mist. Jonquils and daffodils are either the same plant or different, depending on who you ask._
> 
> _The only thing that ties them all together, the only common denominator outside of the fact that they're all flowering plants, is the Victorians._
> 
> _I found a site that translated the list for me. And with every entry, I... I have no words for it. Even now, a week later, I still cannot say anything._
> 
> _Oak leaves and stock. Stock. For me. That's the first time anyone has ever—at least since my last tour—said anything like that about me. Before it was...well, it was pleasant and polite but it wasn't_ stock _. Love in a mist? There should be some tucked in with the nasturtiums. Honestly._
> 
> _The geraniums gave me pause, because they came early, and I wasn't sure what the point of it all was. I figured it out, though. Nice restraint in not including parsley and clematis, by the way._
> 
> _They're all beautiful, but it's going to take a rather large limb from an olive tree to make up for what was done and left undone._

 A postcard with a shot of the Sphinx and a Chilean stamp arrived two weeks later, with one sentence on it: 

>   _A field of snowdrops for both of us._

The message raised Jo's heart rate, made her think that things were on the cusp of change. Between the last two cards, she was certain that the next missive she received would reference a homecoming. Anticipation wrapped around fear and took up residence just under her diaphragm, the tension stretching each day like taffy; minutes dragging into hours like molasses in the antarctic. 

> **_Is it time, yet?_ **
> 
> _I think my clocks are all running a month and a half slow._
> 
> _Campanula. Bindweed. Reeds and sloe. Nasturtiums. Hellebore!_
> 
> _Sometimes I wonder how I've survived this long. Better go find some lunch._

\- - * - -

The next card finally arrived, bringing disappointment and hope in equal measure. 

> _I spent a month in a place with an amazing garden._  
>  _Wouldn't be out of place in Versailles, that's how amazing._  
>  _I don't know if I could recreate it, myself._  
>  _Leave gardening to the experts, that's what I say,_  
>  _like most things that need a delicate touch._  
>  _Couldn't ever keep pot plants alive, anyway --_  
>  _One I had died within a week!_  
>  _Might have been because I lived in an_  
>  _especially dark basement flat, though._  
>  _Hope to make it somewhere warmer and lighter, soon._  
>  _On the coast would be ideal._  
>  _Majorca is supposed to be nice this time of year,_  
>  _even if that means everyone and their dog is visiting too._  
>  _Took a long walk around a lake, yesterday, and out_  
>  _on the water was a pair of swans._  
>  _You'd be surprised at how rude the birds are; it seems they've declared_  
>  _open season on humanity._  
>  _Until I have more time,_

The picture was of a nondescript sunset, the stamp a plain USA flag, and there was no descriptive text on the back outside of the message. Jo read it a couple of times, then pushed it across the table to make room for a bill, not really thinking about much of anything... And that may have been why, when she looked up from the total owed, that she saw it. 

It wasn't anything special, just the word _home_. One corner of her mouth twitched upward as she remembered _BATMAN_ spelled out by track titles: here she was picking out another word in a set of sentences—

 _Home._ The word lit up the inside of her head, the flat and the general mundane bits of her life fading away as one thought blossomed from the heart of the supernova: What if—Whatif— _whatifwhatifwhatIF—_

Jo swept the bill onto the floor and pulled the postcard toward herself, running the tip of her index finger down the edge of the sentences. They were almost all started one under the other, and... 

> _I will come home to you._

She got up so fast that her chair turned over, but she didn't care in the least. All she wanted was to get over to the mantle and the skull—There. The woman sat down on the rug, dropping the last two cards on the floor beside her to get to one that was likely to have a message. It did: _wait for me._

Before that came _It hurts without you_ , before that was _Stay strong for me_ , before that was _I wish I were home_ , before that was _Sorry_ , and the very first message had been _I miss you._

They had been having a conversation, of sorts. The postcard with _sorry_ on it—the men in suits—had come after she'd posted about being angry. And there was the line _You have more than you know_ , which... Well, it made sense _now_ , after the flowers. 

Jo gathered up her postcards and put them back behind the skull, righted the chair, and sat down to write what was likely the most nonsensical and most vital post of her entire life. 

> **_I'm still not mad._ **
> 
> _At least not_ very _mad. Also, if you think you see something troubling in the following (which I'm linking to, again, so don't bother if you don't want to read what won't make sense), you're reading entirely too much into it._
> 
> _...then again, come to think of it, that happens to me a lot. Anyway._
> 
> _\-- Read More --_
> 
> _So:_
> 
> _Jocasta H. Watson has never_  
>  _exactly been the most luminous of people;_  
>  _rather dim in some ways –_  
>  _until dropped into a_  
>  _situation that required her particular brilliance._  
>  _Atypical situations, you know,_  
>  _like saving lives under fire._  
>  _Entirely unlike the daily practice of a GP – not that I'm complaining._  
>  _Most of the time, I'm content to deal with the small things_  
>  _on a regular basis._  
>  _A bullet wound is something of a learning experience that way._  
>  _Keeping up with the world's only consulting  
> _ _detective was illuminating in an entirely different way._  
>  _Only afterward did I see where the light had come from._  
>  _Now, there are long shadows and_  
>  _obfuscations, neither of which are surprises._  
>  _[Thesauruses (or thesaurii? Thesaurae?) are worth exploring, from time to time]_  
>  _Keeping up with the world's only consulting detective was worth it._  
>  _Even when it meant long nights,_  
>  _even when it meant jumping from one roof to another (oh god I really did that),_  
>  _pursuing suspects and evidence alike._  
>  _Madness, yes, brilliant fantastic amazing madness._  
>  _Even when I was actively cursing the both of us for ten kinds of fool, it_  
>  _was worth it._  
>  _After everything, yes, it was still worth it._  
>  _Intransigent, stubborn, inexplicable, vexing, horrid, selfless (if you squint),_  
>  _tall, and that_ coat _._  
>  _I won't—can't—enumerate the little things that I was privileged to see,_  
>  _nothing others would think noteworthy except for the person behind them._  
>  _Given time, I may. She deserves to be known for more than what she was left with._
> 
> _I think I should like to grow white violets and jonquils, if only in a garden of my own imagining._

 - - * - -

After that post, no more postcards arrived. As the timing of the cards had been erratic to begin with, Jo refused to worry—until, six weeks to the day after the post, Myra called. 

"Be ready to leave in ten minutes," she said. "A car will come for you." 

"Why—What—Is this about—" 

"Just be ready, Doctor," Myra said, and hung up. 

Anthony was waiting for her when Jo climbed in. "Hello, again," she said. 

"Hi." Anthony kept typing for a minute. 

"I know I'll probably get anything but the answer I'm looking for, but... Hope springs eternal and all that. Where are we going?" 

"Heathrow." 

"Okay." She waited for a pause. "Why? I mean, I assume I'm getting on a plane, but _why_ am I?" 

"Because the distance between here and there is too great to be crossed efficiently by ground transportation," Anthony said, looking up at her. "And no, I can't tell you any more than that." 

"Can you tell me how long it'll take?" 

"Mm... No." Anthony gave her a sympathetic smile, though, and added, "Red tape, you know. Never can predict how long that will take." 

"Good thing I brought my passport." 

"Don't worry about it. You'll have everything you'll need," he said, and went back to ignoring her.

\- - * - -

Eight hours, three planes, and a ride in a van in need of new suspension later, Jo was dropped off at the door of what appeared to be some sort of religious group's compound. There was a brass plaque over the bell that read _The Order of the Selfless – make yourself known and be welcome_. The man driving the van was busy unloading boxes, so Jo pressed the button and waited. 

A spotty boy of about fourteen opened the door and looked her up and down. "Sorry, right, um. You are?" 

"Doctor Jo Watson," Jo said, taking a deep breath and letting it out as panic-sparked adrenaline began to run through her, drawing a soldier-doctor's calm around her like a mantle. "I was—"

The boy's face lit, his hands darting out to grab hers; he dragged her over the threshold. "Oh! Oh _good_ , good, this way, come on!" 

"I, uh—I'm glad you're happy to see me—" Jo followed along, giving up on conversation in favor of marking her surroundings. What she saw wasn't particularly telling: the building had clearly seen years of use and care; it was clean and in good repair. The few pieces of artwork she spied were a landscape, a still life, and an abstract; the one span of windows had looked out onto what was probably a garden. The two of them passed a handful of other people, all of whom wore the same sort of plain tunic-and-trousers outfit as her guide. 

"Sister Lehabim...is in here," the boy said, as they stopped at a nondescript interior door. "She... Sister Bethesda, she said you're a _doctor_ , so, so, please—She's so—" 

Jo didn't bother to ask—this was a Myra Adventure, so questions were pointless—just opened the door and stepped through. The room on the other side was small, maybe the size of the bathroom at home, with a small clerestory window and a bed. The bed was occupied by Sister Lehabim, who was entirely too tall for it – her feet were clearly hanging over the end of the mattress. 

She didn't even have to ask what was wrong, she could _smell_ it. Jo crossed to the bed and gave the woman's head a quick check—nothing obvious there. Ignoring the odd feeling that she recognized her patient—silly, really, the woman had sharp cheekbones, but so did any number of others. She also had the bare fuzz of stubble on her scalp like everyone else in the building that Jo had seen to date—she turned her attention to gently peeling back the bedding. Her patient wore a vest which provided only the barest modesty—it was hiked up very nearly to her nipples. "What the hell _happened_ to her?" 

"She said it was nothing, an accident, that she did it to herself." 

"All of which are patent lies," Jo said, looking over her shoulder at the woman who had appeared in the doorway. "Even _I_ can tell that much. Is there anything like a first aid kit around here?" 

"Of course they are, because Sister Lehabim never tells the truth when a lie would serve better. I sent Brother Haniel to retrieve the supplies you brought with you," the woman said, joining her at the bedside. "Sister Lehabim is...special, doctor. Please... Please do everything you can. We shall do our part, as well." 

"I didn't bring—" The boxes. Anthony had said she'd have everything she needed, hadn't he? "Of course, I'll do everything I can, anything I can. Um, Jo Watson," she said, offering her hand. 

"Sister Bethesda," she said, taking her hand. 

"How long has she been—How long has it been since you knew she was injured?" 

"She came back the night it happened, so... A week? Yes, a week." Bethesda nodded. 

A week. Jo turned back to Lehabim and knelt, examining the wounds as closely and as carefully as she could. They were all presenting with _textbook_ signs of infection, from the radiating red lines to the heat to the purulent discharge that welled up when she dared press around a small puncture wound, and good God was that _thread_ making up those sutures? "Who sewed her up?" 

"She did, as far as I know," Bethesda said, "I told her that it wasn't going to end well, but she's never listened to me." 

"If she lives through this, I'd recommend a hearty dose of _I told you so_. Daily," Jo said, shaking her head at the whole thing. 

"Here we are, Sister," Haniel—the boy from earlier—said. "Do you want 'em in here?" 

"Actually," Jo said, a faintly pained expression on her face, "could we commandeer the dining table and a couple of good lamps?" 

"Of course," Bethesda said. "Take those to the dining room, please, Haniel, then send... Is that Sister Adaliah? Adaliah, when you've done that, go get the lamps from Sister Bethaven's room. If she's there and tells you you can't, take them anyway and tell her to see me. And if one of you could send Brother Hezekiah to us as well, please."

"Right!" Adaliah and Haniel's voices overlapped, and then they pattered off to complete their tasks.  

"Thank you," Jo said, then frowned and looked up at her. "You wouldn't happen to have any Kosher salt, would you?" 

"Not in my pockets," Bethesda said, smiling at her. "But I believe there is rather a large supply in the kitchen." 

"Right. Good. Towels, I'll need towels," she muttered, thinking about the job ahead. Lehabim already had an infection, and while the table and towels weren't likely to be anything near sterile, at least she wouldn't be working on loose soil, or in mud, or any of a dozen other scenarios she'd dealt with. "And some flannels." 

"'Thesda..." 

"Lebby," Bethesda said, leaning over and putting her hand on her forehead. "The doctor's here. You're going to be fine." 

"Doctor? Don' wannem," Lehabim said, brows drawing together and down, lower lip pushing out. "Wanna drink." 

"Sure," Jo said, when Bethesda glanced at her. "She needs it, and it's not like she'll be under general anesthetic." She got up and went around to the other side of the bed, then helped Bethesda get Lehabim propped more-or-less upright. 

"Hate dreamin'," Lehabim said, when they'd let her go. "'Lways dream 'bout things'll never happen..." 

"Everyone has dreams like that," Bethesda said, holding a glass of water to her mouth. "Here, have some water." 

"Not me." 

Jo took the opportunity to study the pattern of the injuries on Lehabim from a distance. She looked like she'd been... Well, she looked like she'd been in a fight. There were the big wounds on her chest, including the one that had been sewn up with (Jo still had trouble believing it) plain cotton thread (or maybe 50/50 polyamide blend, whatever, it was still _thread_ , covered in germs and—). There were smaller cuts on her forearms, the placement of which suggested that she'd been holding her arms up to defend herself. Huh. 

"What happened to you, L—Sister Lehabim?" 

Lehabim's eyes opened, just a little, as she let her head flop over in in Jo's direction. "Got hurt. G'way. Don' want this dream 'gain." 

"You're not dreaming," Jo said, reaching out and poking Lehabim in the shoulder. "See?" 

"Stoppit." Lehabim turned her head away from the woman, her lower lip trembling. "Jus' _go._ " 

"It's the fever, I expect," Bethesda said, apology in both voice and posture. 

"It's all right," Jo said, holding up a hand. "At least she's not screaming nasty things about my mother—that's never fun." 

"People...scream insulting things about your mother at you?" 

Jo gave her a genuine smile at the incredulity of the question. "Used to do, yeah. 'S what happens when you're treating life-threatening wounds under fire without anesthetic." 

"Army doctor," Lehabim added, though she still wasn't looking at Jo; her voice was rough with emotion as well as illness. " _Very_ good army doctor."  

"Oh! Did you serve together?" Bethesda's cheer leaked away as she registered the look on Jo's face. "What is it?" 

"Lehabim," Jo said, sinking to her knees once more, "how did you know that I'd been a _very good_ army doctor?" 

"Obvious," Lehabim said, though perhaps not sounding as witheringly scornful as she'd have liked. "Still 'live." 

Hope and terror spiked her heartbeat. "Look at me." Jo cleared her throat and lifted her left hand, but she didn't touch the woman in the bed. "Please. Look at me, open your eyes—" 

"Only a dream," Lehabim said, pointedly turning her face further away. "'S _always_ a dream." 

"Sherlock," Jo breathed, because it was the only thing she could think of, the only thing she _wanted_ , "God, please, just _look_ at me." Impossible green-blue-grey eyes, hazy and dull, looked out of a face that when Jo _looked_ at it she could see the jaw line, the cheekbones and it was all she could do to keep from throwing her arms around the idiot. 

"Jo. You're here?" 

"Yeah, I'm here, you bleeding great _pillock_ ," she said, and put her hand on Sherlock's face. "What the hell did you get into this time? And _how?_ There's no one here!" 

"The Order is," Sherlock said, closing her eyes and pushing into the warmth of Jo's hand. 

"They're hardly the sort to, what, get into a knife-fight with you." 

"Take me home." 

"Can't, not yet." 

"How're you—Oh. Myra." 

"Yeah. I don't know—I didn't know anything until I got here. I still barely know anything, I don't even know how Myra knew you were here, but I'm assuming you got a message to her." 

"Mm," Sherlock said, nudging at Jo's hand once more. 

"You wanted me, Sister?" A large man leaned through the doorway. 

"Oh! Hezekiah, good. If you could please help us get Lehabim into the dining room?" Bethesda gestured at the woman in the bed. 

"Of course," Hezekiah said.

\- - * - -

"Fifty thousand CCs of saline," Jo said, "and half of it Hartmann's. Okay. Um, are there any large rectangular pans in the kitchen?" 

Adaliah flashed a smile at her and disappeared through the baize-covered door. There were some clangs and a small crash, then she was back with a hotel pan in her hands. "This do?" 

"Perfectly," Jo said. "Would you please take four bags of the plain saline and two of the Hartmann's into the kitchen and get them warming? If you've got a thermometer, that'd be best; they need to be kept in water that's never warmer than about 105-110." 

"Yess'm," she said, making a passable salute. 

Amused, Jo returned it. "Not bad, Medic Adaliah. I was a captain with the Fifth Northumberland—how do you feel about being a fusilier?" 

"Sounds fun," she said, then hurried off. 

"Jo?" 

"Right here," she said, moving around the chair with one of the boxes of stuff that _wasn't_ saline solutions to stand at Sherlock's shoulder. "All right?"

"Feel vile."

"Yes, well, you'll likely feel worse before you feel better. What possessed you to use plain sewing thread to stitch yourself up?"

Sherlock's eyes cracked open. "Necess'ty. An' it worked _b'fore_."

"I am going to lecture you, with _pictures_ and _diagrams,_ when you're well again. At least once a week," she said, resting her hand on Sherlock's shoulder. "Are you warm enough?" 

"Have a fever." 

"So you do." She patted Sherlock, then pulled the chair around so she could dig through the supplies. 

Sherlock turned her head and watched as Jo opened the last box. "Haven't read much online lately." 

"Can't say I'm surprised," Jo said, her brows rising as she discovered a couple of carrier boxes; one was filled with vials of stringently-regulated narcotics, the other with 100-milliliter ampoules of MVI concentrate. Myra's doing, no doubt; she could see a pen and a register inside, which was strangely reassuring. Or it was, until the enormity of the trust placed in her finally settled into her consciousness. "Not even my blog?" 

"No." 

Jo picked through the anesthetics and chose a standard local, setting the vial on the table beside her. She also picked out a box of gloves, a box of sterile gauze pads, a couple of boxes of powdered antibiotics, a tube of antiseptic ointment, and a vial of tetanus vaccine, since she couldn't remember the last time she'd asked Sherlock about the date of her last booster. (Of course, there was every possibility that the reply had been "vaccinations are boring", so.) "I wrote a post that told you that I'd figured out the postcards... And I also suggested another three things for a garden, though to be honest you mentioned one of them already." 

"Mm?" 

Jo retrieved a surgical kit (though she doubted she'd need much of it) and a kidney dish, then dug out a handful of small syringes, one 500 CC syringe, and a couple of 25-gauge needles. "Jonquils. I added white violets and Jerusalem oak. I also told you not to keep me waiting, but since you didn't see it, it doesn't matter. Mr Hudson knew you weren't dead without being told, by the way." 

"Can't be _violets_ if they're _white_ ," Sherlock grumbled. "What're they 'gain?" 

"Not important, right now," Jo said, patting her shoulder on her way by. "I'm going to go wash up and retrieve my assistant." 

\- - * - -

"All right. First things first," Jo said, putting the big needle on a syringe barrel. "Medic Adaliah, draw up the contents of this MVI and inject it through the big blue port into the bag of saline you brought back, please." 

"Yess'm," Adaliah said, taking the syringe and the ampoule. She considered the three items for a moment, then got to work.

"This is going to sting," Jo said to Sherlock, setting the local aside and showing her the syringe. "Try to hold still." 

"Just get on with it," Sherlock said, eyes closed and head turned away.  

When the two of them were done with their respective tasks, Jo set up the very basic IV stand that had been in the bottom of one of the boxes and took it around to Sherlock's right side.  "Now, then. Antiseptic wipe, please, Medic Adaliah." 

"Antiseptic, yess'm," Adaliah said, tearing open the packet before setting it in Jo's palm. 

"Thank you." She cradled Sherlock's right elbow in her right palm, then swept the wet cloth over the woman's inner arm. "Going to get the IV started while you're getting numb, since you need it anyway. Medic Adaliah, please start laying the wet flannels on Sher—Lehabim's chest. Not so wet they drip, but not wrung completely dry, either." 

"Mm," Sherlock said, watching the process of inserting the Y-port and taping it down. "Want me t'tell you what happened?" 

"Let me see if I can figure it out... You... Got into a knife fight with someone who's right-handed," Jo said, smiling as Sherlock's eyes opened a little more. "Most of the damage is on _your_ left. If it'd been a lefty, it'd be over here." She tapped one of Sherlock's annoyingly obvious ribs. "And...they were shorter than you, and either the blade was short or you were wearing something that made it hard for them to get the right angle on it to actually _kill_ you. You used your arms to protect yourself, which meant you either didn't have a weapon or you were just trying to distract them long enough for something or someone else to happen along." 

"'S good," Sherlock said, one corner of her mouth pulling up. 

"Good? It's amazing!" Adaliah lifted the edge of a flannel and squinted at the cuts beneath. "All of that from just _looking_ at you!" 

Jo laughed and shook her head, then blinked as she realized that Sherlock was giving her one of her real, rare smiles. "Shall I, or are you up to it?" 

"You do it. I d'wanna be..." Sherlock raised her brows. 

"All right, then." Jo looked up at the young woman, still smiling a bit crookedly. "It's more than just looking, it's _observing_. There's also knowing how to interpret your observations." Jo paused to mix up the antibiotics in the 500 CC syringe, then returned the liquid to the second bag of saline she'd hung up. She attached the IV lines to the port in Sherlock's arm, then went around what she'd labeled the head of the table because that's where Sherlock's head _was_.

Jo peeled back a flannel and pointed at the yellow-orange scabbing. "We can tell that the knife was short or impaired because there are very few puncture-type wounds—in fact, only one on Sherlock's torso, and it's this one. The rest are clearly slices, and the angle of them implies someone who was either shorter than Sherlock, which is most of us, or someone standing over her. 

"We can _probably_ rule out standing-over by looking at the injuries on the backs of her arms," Jo said, gently folding Sherlock's left arm. "They're also mostly slicing-type injuries and..." She pressed carefully at the bottom of one of the largest. "That hurt?" 

"Not really," Sherlock said, wiggling her fingers. 

"Good." She pointed at the line of healthy scabbing. "You can see here that it's pretty shallow. If someone was standing over her, it'd be shallow along the curve of her arm, then go deeper when the point of the knife hit the muscle here." 

"Oh," Adaliah said, gathering the flannels and dropping them into the bowl of hot saltwater at her elbow. She gave them a stir, then pulled them out, squeezed most of the water from them, and laid them over Sherlock's chest once again. "And... The cut would be more ragged, right? Like when you push scissors through brown tape instead of pulling them over it." 

"Exactly," Sherlock said, "God, it's good to be around people who can _think_." 

"Sister Bethaven always says it's a sin to be stupid," Adaliah said, with a shrug. 

"Would that more people thought like her," Sherlock said. 

A few flannel-changes later, Jo pressed the skin around the worst of the injuries. "Any pain?"

"Just pressure," Sherlock said. "Go on." 

"Of course." She held out her hand to Adaliah and said, "Gauze, please, Medic." 

"Here you are." Adaliah put a few pieces into the doctor's hand.

" This... You don't have to watch this, if you don't want to." Jo glanced over her shoulder at her. 

"I think it's fascinating. And besides, I'm your assistant. I can't help you if I'm not here," she said. 

"All right, then. Pour some of the reserved saltwater over this area, would you?" 

"Yess'm." 

Jo set to work, gently wiping the scabs away in most places, loosening them up around the self-administered sutures. Adaliah sluiced warm water over Sherlock's side at Jo's direction, replaced the gauze as needed, and was generally quiet save for acknowledging Jo's requests and the occasional hum of interest. 

"Now what?" Adaliah said, when that was done. 

"Now they get expressed as much as possible, the foreign matter comes out of that one," she pointed at the thread, "and then it's irrigation and sanitation before they're bandaged up." 

"Right. More gauze?" She gestured at the stack. 

"Clean-up first, replace our gloves and the towels, then yes, the gauze." She gathered up the dishes they'd used and set them aside, gathered the trash and binned it, then peeled off her gloves. Jo stood up and leaned over to look at Sherlock's face. "Feeling anything?" 

"Kind of sleepy. Queasy." Sherlock's entire face scrunched up and she turned her head away from Jo, as if what she was about to say was painful or disturbing. "Hungry." 

"As soon as we're done, you can have something to eat. Medic Adaliah, how much of the saltwater do we have left?" 

"Um... Looks like we're down to about a third, ma'am," she said, peering into the carafe. "Shall I make some more?" 

"That would be splendid." 

"Right away, ma'am!" She smiled at them and bounced off to take care of it. 

"They seem to like you here," Jo said, over the soft noise of the door closing. "Both Haniel and Bethesda were concerned about you, and Adaliah doesn't want to be made to do anything but help."

"'S the usual story," Sherlock said, making a small gesture with her right hand. "I helped them, once." 

"You know, you work spectacularly hard at seeming as if you're only looking out for yourself and damn everyone else," Jo said, shifting so she could lean over and curve her hand around the top of Sherlock's head. "But you're not, not at all. There was some reason that you...did what you did, and I'm still quite angry with you about some parts of it, but part of the reason had to be the same thing I saw...at the pool. You were willing to sac—"

"Shh," Sherlock said, shaking her head a little. "Later. At home." She opened her eyes, grabbing at Jo's shirt with her left hand. "I—I can come home. Can't I?" 

Jo curled over until their foreheads touched, until she had to close her eyes because there was nothing she could focus on otherwise. "Of course," she whispered. "Not getting out of being lectured _that_ easily." 

Sherlock made an amused sound and turned her head a little, bumping her nose against Jo's. She wasn't sure how long they stayed there, on the line between What Had Been and What Would Be—she thought she might have drifted off for a bit—but the next thing she knew Jo was straightening up and Adaliah's footsteps were coming their way. 

"Here you are, ma'am, just-a-bit-warmer-than-body-temperature saltwater," she said, putting the carafe down before returning to her seat. 

"Thank you." Jo nodded at her, then tugged at the fabric under Sherlock. "Budge up, Sherlock—There." She replaced the sodden towels with dry, then went to wash up again. 

"You didn't tell us you were in love with someone," Adaliah said, when the door had closed behind the captain. 

"Sentiment's dangerous." She turned her head and considered the young woman through half-open eyes. "'Sides, wasn't relevant." 

"We would have gotten her here sooner," she said, glancing at the kitchen door. "If she'd known you were here..."

"If she'd known, she'd've...sacrificed 'erself. Maybe gotten killed."

"She's been a soldier," Adaliah said, chin in her hand and elbow on her knee. "She's sort of...jolly, but there's something solid under it, isn't there?" 

"'Ve I told you I love you people?" Sherlock's mouth curled into a little smile. 

"Once in a while, yeah," she said, returning the smile. "But Brother Chalcol says if you _really_ loved us, you'd eat when he puts food in front of you."

"Eating's bo—"

"Oh, shut up. You'd eat anything the captain gave you, wouldn't you?" 

Sherlock gave her her best _stop speaking, you irritating peasant_ glare, her annoyance increasing as the young woman ignored it. 

"That's a yes," Adaliah added, teeth flashing as she grinned at Sherlock. "Aw. You're mad for her, aren't you?" 

"Now you're being tiresome," Sherlock said, attempting to dismiss her with boredom. 

"You are, you're _so_ mad for her!" 

"Are you tormenting my patient?" Jo asked the question mildly; between the petulant _I'm ignoring you_ expression on Sherlock's face and Adaliah's hastily-suppressed giggles, she already knew. Pulling on a fresh pair of gloves, she returned to her place at Sherlock's side. 

"Not very much," Adaliah admitted. 

"She thinks there's something _amusing_ about chemical defects," Sherlock said, making the effort to snip off each word in the most precise manner possible. 

"I see," Jo said, gently pressing along the edges of the largest injury. "Still numb?" 

"Quite," Sherlock said, closing her eyes. "I've not had much practice, you know. At...any of it. I...will likely fail you in new and painful ways." 

"If you always trust me with the truth, I may be able to forgive a lot," Jo said, quietly, holding her hand out to Adaliah. "Scissors, please." 

"Scissors," she said, and passed them over. 

"Even if the truth is...harmful?" 

"Even if it's that you loathe me and you want to strangle me in my sleep," Jo said, clipping the loops of thread with smart little clicks. "Tweezers, please, Medic." 

"Here you are, ma'am," Adaliah said, pressing the tweezers into her hand. 

"I won't be...anyone but myself." 

"And I haven't put up with that before, at all." She really did try to keep the sarcasm to a minimum, _really_. Jo sighed and carefully pulled the first of the self-administered sutures free of Sherlock's flesh. It came out with very little resistance, and she relaxed a bit. Maybe it wouldn't be as awful as she feared. 

"Jo..." 

"I don't _want_ you to be anyone else," Jo snapped, the anger she thought had gone blazing into shocking life. She stood up and leaned over to glare at Sherlock. "I want you to be as brilliant and thoughtless and amazing and unkind and fascinating and ignorant of primary-school stuff as you ever were. And I want you to fucking promise me that you will _never_ fucking lie to me again. Because you _did_ lie to me, you lied when you told me you were a fake and you lied when you said it was all a trick and you fucking _lied_ when you jumped off that goddamned _building_ , Sherlock. I couldn't find your pulse and _you were dead_ and it was all a fucking _lie_. 

"So yes, Sherlock, you can come home, and yes, I will cross the entire country or even the room to fish your stupid mobile out of your own pocket because you're too fucking _busy_ to get it yourself, and yes, of course I will fucking _patch you up_ when you've gotten on the wrong side of yet another idiot with a weapon, and _yes_ by God I will fucking _love you_. But only, _only_ , if you can promise me the truth for the rest of however long we have. Do you understand me?" 

"Forever." Sherlock opened her eyes, staring up into Jo's face. 

She knew her Captain Watson Voice only worked on Sherlock approximately three percent of the time, but she didn't hesitate to try using it. "Say it."

"The truth. Forever. Always. Only for you." 

"Good." Jo nodded. "Very good. Now, I'm going to finish fixing you, and then you're going to eat, and then you're going back to sleep. Clear?" 

"Yes." 

"All right." 

Jo dropped into her chair again and plucked thread from Sherlock's side with ruthless efficiency. Done with that, she turned to Adaliah. "Five hundred CC syringe, please, Medic." 

"Five—Ah, here you are." 

"Good. And would you please fetch me two of the bags of plain saline from the pan?" 

"Right away, ma'am." Adaliah gave her another salute and sauntered off.  

While Adaliah was gone, Jo put together a scalpel and used it to reopen the sutured wound, making a face as mingled blood and pus oozed out of it. 

"Here you are," Adaliah said, bringing the bags over. "Oh, ew." 

"Welcome to the medical profession," Jo said, her tone dry. She drew off a third of a litre of saline, then pointed at a small packet at Adaliah's elbow. "Hand me the irrigation tip, would you?" 

"This?" Adaliah picked up the thing that looked like a satellite dish shrunk to fit in one's palm, opening it when Jo nodded. "Here you are." 

"Thanks." 

\- - * - -

Much later, Jo sat at Sherlock's bedside, waiting for the thermometer to register the woman's temperature. She plucked it from Sherlock's mouth when it beeped, a speculative frown wrinkling her forehead. "Thirty-eight point five," she said. "Higher than I'd like, but better than it could be."

"True." Sherlock waited quietly while Jo rattled a pair of painkillers out of a bottle and handed them over. 

"Tell me about it?" Jo asked it while looking at a small watercolor of a plane flying over a lake. 

"Moriarty. Or Brooke Richards, which was her real name," Sherlock said, settling back into the thin comfort of the pillow between her knobby spine and the wall. "You know about the events that led to...Bart's, except for when she came over for tea and what happened after. So, I was waiting for her in the flat..." 

"If Myra sent me here, it must be safe," Jo said, when Sherlock had finished her story. 

"Safe enough, I suppose," Sherlock said, her right shoulder lifting in a shrug. "At least until I'm well enough to start helping Lestrade bring her clearance rate back up." 

"Mm," Jo said, glancing at her. "Given that you're pretty much _persona non grata_ around the Yard, I don't know if you'll be welcomed back at all." 

"Of course I will," Sherlock said, putting up a brittle shadow of her usual arrogance. "They _need_ me." 

"There's no point in speculating without all the facts, is there?" Jo raised her eyebrows. 

"Of course not." Sherlock snorted at that, then pressed her lips together. 

Jo, watching her and recognizing Sherlock's _I absolutely refuse to yawn_ face, made a point of looking at her watch. "Past time for bed," she said, getting to her feet.

"Not tired," Sherlock said, immediately. 

"When your most brilliant argument is a reflexive contradiction of a statement of fact, yes, you _are_ tired," Jo said as she checked the IV bags. "And I remember what you said about contradictions."

Sherlock tucked her chin and pushed her lower lip out, looking up at Jo through her lashes. "No, really, I'm not at all tired." 

"Just lie down and rest, then," Jo said, crossing to the light switch and leaning against the wall. "I'll sit with you for a bit. I'm in the room across the hall, and my mobile number's still the same." 

"Fine," Sherlock grumbled, then gingerly wriggled down in the still-too-short bed until she was curled up on her right side. "But I'm not tired."

"I know." Jo turned out the light, closed the door to mitigate the amount of light leaking in from the hall, and returned to her chair. "Where's your—there. Now close your eyes and rest." 

"You said you'd love me," Sherlock said, after Jo had found her hand in the dark. 

"I also said I'd lecture you." 

"That's love, too. Sometimes." A pause. "Isn't it?" 

Jo made an amused sound. "Yeah. Sometimes." 

"I didn't know. I didn't know that it'd feel like _you_ had died."

"I... Sometimes I wondered...why. Why you'd done it, why I wasn't...enough. To keep you here." 

"You were." Sherlock swallowed, fidgeted with Jo's hand, swallowed again. "If you... If I had met _her_ without ever having met you... I don't think I'd be here, now." 

The words were just above a murmur, but the building was quiet enough that they seemed like they might carry to the ends of the earth. Jo pulled her left hand free of Sherlock's grasp, trading it for her right; she put her dominant hand on what was left of Sherlock's hair. "I don't think that's completely true." 

"I might have written off the deaths as merely the price one pays for being boring," Sherlock said. "As long as _I_ was...sufficiently diverted, as long as there was another puzzle, another challenge... I don't know if it would have been as...affecting." 

"I remember the look on your face when the woman—the blind woman—was killed," Jo said, thumb sweeping over fuzz in rhythmic arcs. "You weren't unaffected, and that was before the row."

"Yeah." Sherlock laced her fingers through Jo's. "It was you. At the pool. It was you, and realizing that... That... That if we were anyone else, and _she_ was playing games with someone else and you'd—we'd... Well, I would've wanted someone to _stop_ her." 

"Ah." Jo let her breath out, slowly. "You did point out that people had died," she said, after a moment or two. "And as I said, you were ready to—"

"But only because of you," Sherlock said. "If I'd been on my own..." 

"You weren't." Jo ran her hand over Sherlock's hair. "You aren't." 

"Mm." 

Jo kept up her stroking, listening to Sherlock's breathing deepen and slow. When her grip went slack, Jo extricated her hand and leaned over to press a kiss to Sherlock's forehead. "See you in the morning, love," she murmured, then slipped off to her own room. 

**Author's Note:**

> Final Notes, Links, And Other Stuff:
> 
> \- About the names... I've always liked Jocasta, and it seems like every genderbent John is renamed Joan. As for Mycroft... I just couldn't bring myself to leave her named Mycroft. I wanted to keep the initial syllable, though, so Myra she became. As for the names of those in The Order of the Selfless: Adaliah means 'one that draws water'; Bethaven means 'house of trouble'; Bethesda means 'house of mercy'; Haniel means 'the gift of God'; Hezekiah means 'strength of the the Lord'; Lehabim means 'inflamed' or 'swords' (I was looking for weaponry first. The other meaning was just a happy coincidence.).
> 
> \- The flowers: [You can find the list I took them from here](http://www.victorianbazaar.com/meanings.html). Fair warning: there's an embedded quicktime player (I don't know what it plays) and some of the entries are misspelled. I also chose to use the Latin name of some of them, mostly because the common name is a little too obvious. So! Here's just the flowers/plants mentioned above:
> 
> Representing, speaking to, or speaking for Jo: oak leaves (bravery), cedar (think of me), geraniums in general (true friend; they can also mean stupidity/folly, so you can see how they might confuse someone), artemesia (don't be discouraged), traveler's joy (rest, safety), nasturtiums (victory in battle), a crown of roses (a sign of superior merit); later she mentions campanula (grief), bindweed (uncertainty), reeds (music), sloe (difficulty), hellebore (relieve my anxiety), olive (branch; peace/truce), Jerusalem oak (your feelings are reciprocated), and jonquils (desire).
> 
> Representing, speaking to, or speaking for Sherlock: purple hyacinth (please forgive me), thornapple (I dream of you), white roses with question marks on every last petal (I am worthy of you, not that Sherlock is sure of that), rhododendron (beware/danger), ranunculus (I am dazzled by your charms), pine (longing, naturally), motherwort (secret love), pansy (you occupy my thoughts), mezereon (desire to please), nigella damascena (aka love-in-a-mist; you puzzle me), stock (you will always be beautiful to me), amaranthus (aka love-lies-bleeding; not heartless), jonquils (love me/desire) and daffodils (regard, respect, unrequited love), gladioli (I am sincere), dahlias (forever thine), lemon (I promise to be true) and peach blossoms (I am your captive).
> 
> Representing both/miscellany: snowdrops (hope), white violets (let's take a chance on happiness), parsley (useful knowledge), clematis (cleverness).
> 
> Landmarks/places: [The Fisherman's Bastion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishermen's_bastion), [Hassan II Mosque](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_II_Mosque), [Majorca](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorca), [Mt Etna](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt_Etna), [Erie Canal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal), [Trafalgar Square](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafalgar_Square), [Blue Ridge mountains](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ridge_Mountains), [Sun Voyager ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Voyager)
> 
> Food-related: [Mazarin tarts](http://www.cmariec.com/?p=9157), [Opera cake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_cake), [sheep's milk butter](http://valleyshepherd.pinnaclecart.com/butter-olive-oil-vinegar/)
> 
> Bats and other things : [Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Poison) (it's quite good, and the TV adaptation is just as good.) [Batman Begins](http://www.amazon.com/Batman-Begins-Original-Picture-Soundtrack/dp/B0036B8WIC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1356319460&sr=8-1&keywords=batman+begins+soundtrack) (tracks 4-9 spell BATMAN), [Bats by family, then genus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bats), [miniature cows](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_cattle), [Hartmann's solution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmann%27s_solution), [vintage suit porn (and occasionally just straight-up vintage gay porn)](http://vintagegaymen.tumblr.com/)


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